Turn off Flash in Chrome

Yesterday I followed Tracy Hern's advice and turned off the Flash plug-in in Chrome/Mac, and things are now running faster and in less memory.

Haven't had a clipboard failure since. Of course that's not yet proof that the problem is gone. But it's a good sign.

How to

Choose Preferences from the Chrome menu.

At the bottom of the page, click on Show advanced settings.

Click on the Content settings button.

Scroll down to Plug-ins.

Choose Click to play from the set of radio buttons.

Click on the Done button.

What this means

Now, when you visit a web page with Flash movies, instead of seeing a preview, you'll see the image of a jigsaw puzzle piece. If you want to watch the movie, click the image.

Feels really good. I'm not a big fan of movies that start playing while I'm reading, so I like this way of working.

Recommendation to Google

Why not ship Chrome with this setting by default.

iOS users are already accustomed to a world without Flash. Presumably many of us are also Mac users. It's a much more humane way to use the web, without videos starting up automatically while you're doing other stuff. It seems that the human being sitting in front of the computer should decide whether or not they want to watch a movie. I imagine advertisers wouldn't like this. Maybe if you like your users more there will be more of them to see the ads.

Last built: Sun, Mar 22, 2015 at 5:50 PM

By Dave Winer, Tuesday, November 25, 2014 at 9:36 AM. When in doubt, blog.